Back-cracking

With all the stresses and frustrations that the school year has brought by the end of first quarter, summer seems miles away. It’s crazy how much can be felt in just the span of some nine weeks, but I guess it’s longer than we think it is. So, perhaps to try to regain some of my summer piece-of-mind, I am going to revisit those sunnier days.

This summer (such a typical start to a story), I went to summer camp (omg even more classic), the same camp that I’ve been going to for the last four years pretty constantly. The camp--Merrowvista--is an outdoor adventure type of thing, and so as you get older, you are never really at camp, instead you go on longish biking, backpacking, and canoeing trips. This past summer (my last as a camper), I went on a 16 day backpacking trip on the last 115 miles of the Appalachian Trail. Before I go on, I always hesitate to talk about “summer camp” too nonchalantly, because I don’t want it to seem like it’s a privilege that I take for granted. I recognise how much of a luxury it is to be able to go to summer camp, and I am grateful that I have that privilege.

Backpacking. Leading up to the trip--and even before that, I had this kind of odd sense of myself in relation to outdoor activities. You know when you see a commercial or ad for athletic gear and the people in it look sweaty but hot, sporty yet contemplative, and spontaneous but appreciative of the nature around them? That was sort of what I expected going into the trip. Not really, obviously, but I definitely had this idealized picture of backpacking, even though I had done it before some years ago. Needless to say, that was not what backpacking was like. I knew coming into the trip that I liked to hike. I had vague memories of backpacking being hard; but all I was remembering was the top; the view of lakes sprawling out beneath and peaks in the distance.

Obviously, my expectations were unfounded. Backpacking was f****** hard. Fifty pound pack + uphill + tiredness made some days frankly horrible. Adding to that, although my group hiked pretty fast (on some flat-er days we pumped out like 9 miles by lunch), I was one of the slower hikers. That was really hard for me at first, because I felt like I was holding the group back--but gradually over the course of the trip I came to accept my relative slowness and even enjoy it. It allowed me to chill in the back of the pack, and actually have some very meaningful conversations with other people.

Even with the hard work of going uphill, we didn’t always have a view at the top. We would be in the midst of thick trees and a small sign would proclaim: summit of X mountain, X feet. That was the reward. No view, nothing special. But that also was good, because much more often, the effort of painstakingly climbing upwards and getting to that summit became the reward in and of itself--that challenge. One other kind of unrelated thing that surprised me was that even though the region itself was so isolated (I mean it’s called the 100 mile wilderness), I felt a strong sense of community throughout the trail. We were hiking at a time when many through-hikers (those who do the whole trail, from Georgia to Maine) were finishing the whole trail, and so at every lean-to there was someone new with interesting things to say. Everyone had a trail name that others had given them--the rule being that multiple hikers had to agree with it--and it usually fit something about them. One guys name was Rennaisance, another woman’s was Wired another Sunshine. Sometimes when we ran into someone on trail, they would already know who we were, via other hikers who had spread the word. All in all--despite the hardships--backpacking will be something I do for the rest of my life (and maybe I’ll through-hike someday!).

        

photos of my group + mountains

My Own Art Museum

Today we have e-mail, texting, snapchat, facebook, and instagram—and it can be hard to remember that most of our parents had…the landline telephone? So, when my Mom was growing up in the 60s and 70s she, like so many others before her, used postcards as a way to communicate with those not in her immediate surroundings, and that habit has continued throughout her life. My Mom doesn’t like to throw things away and so in my life, her love of postcards has manifested in a household collection of what must be well over 2,000.

        About two years ago I was visiting one of my favorite museums, the MFA (Museum of Fine Arts) in Boston, and they had a feature show on postcards. Curators sorted out about 400 postcards from a huge collection and organized them by theme, date etc. The collection tried to highlight the artistic value that postcards had—as many famous artists and some not so famous ones used the postcard as an artistic medium. Not only that, but the show presented an interesting lens through which to view the last century. Coming away from the show, I gained a new appreciation for the postcards my Mom has collected over the year—I felt as though I had unknowingly had access to a mini-art museum of my own my whole life.

For as long as I can remember, we’ve had a postcard rack in my living room. On rainy days or just when there was extra time, I remember taking out all of my Mom’s numerous post cards and picking a theme. It could be a color, like red or orange, or a place, like the Eiffel Tower, or an artist, like Van Gough…and sure enough there would invariably be 20+ postcards that fit into the desired category. The display will stay up for a while until we get bored, and then a new one will take its place. It can reflect the mood of the season (in winter it’s blue, and green, summer red, yellow etc.) or it can contradict it to remind us of what’s not here (like fields of flowers in the dead of winter and ski photos in the spring). If we are in a traditional mood, Victorian women in frilly frocks will stare back at us, but just as often, Picasso and Chagal tumble up and down the rack. Sometimes no theme exists except for the sender, or date. A huge number of the postcards in the collection are those my Grandpa sent to my Mom, but also my sister and I—so in honor of him and his excellent taste, sometimes only his postcards will be exclusively displayed.

   This constant postcard presence in my life has led me to treasure them as a really unique form for art, but also communication. On vacation, I would say my family purchases an average of 20-30 postcards without fail, wherever we are. My problem is that sometimes I love the image so much that I don’t want to send it—I usually will hang it on my wall instead. Recently, we went through and organized all of the postcards that my Mom has amassed. She did most of the work, but towards the end of the process I was flipping through to look for images to hang in my locker (at school). I started to read the backs of them, and it was fascinating to see the short notes people had sent to my mom over a period of 40 years. Some were about fun vacations, others jobs (a huge theme was dissertation work and woes), others simply about the daily routines of life—and it struck me that this was history in my hands. Some of my mom’s friends had continuously sent her postcards for over thirty years; reading them you could literally chart their lives. It’s crazy to think that in my lifetime, some of those postcards will be close to a hundred years old!